Dynatrace, Liferay Want to Improve Your Digital Experiences

The next time the conversation runs dry or becomes contentious at a backyard barbecue try this: Start talking about your latest lousy digital experience (DX).

It’s something that everyone can relate to, regardless of how diametrically opposed their preferences are.

After all, we’re living in a world where the web is littered with abandoned shopping carts, where the webpage you were looking at at the office can’t be found from your phone and where the technology that is supposed to make things easier makes you want to tear your hair out.

If you think you’re having a bad day when this happens to you, think how the business process owner or guy in IT feels when you multiply that by 100, 1000 or maybe even more.

The Wide World of DX

And the “experience” isn’t only about web pages, content and customer communications. It’s also about the journey — from clicking on a link, launching an app, typing a URL into a browser and beyond. There’s lots of room for things to go wrong.

If you’re a business process owner who loses a sale, an employer whose workers refuse to use “perfectly good” portals to provide, consume or collaborate on information, or a member of a support team that needs to figure out what’s gone wrong, you’ve got a big and important question to answer.

What happened just before user chose to disengage? And how can I prevent that from happening in real time?

Enter Dynatrace

Digital Performance software provider Dynatrace tries to help customers answer questions like that. It's software and analytics have been purposefully built to track the customer journey and to provide insights in real time.

“We’re like an MRI for the customer journey,” said Mike Masterson, director of strategic business development at Dynatrace. He said the company's software could pick out what’s abnormal based on activity. It can then trigger an alert and even suggest a remedial action, when problems occur.

“Users don’t have much patience when things don’t work the first time and every time after,” he said. “They get frustrated, give up and go away.”

Needless to say, companies use Dynatrace to try to keep that from happening.

One major retailer, who Dynatrace doesn’t have permission to name, uses its real time product to send an alert every time a customer abandons a cart packed with $1,000 or more of products. Why did the customer leave completing the transaction?

To find out, the retailer reaches reach out to the customer to try to help him complete the sale. The retailer also looks back to see what went wrong, in case it’s systemic.

New Partnership

Today Dynatrace announced a new partnership with Liferay, which produces portal software under an open source license.

The companies have been working together to build a new product, the Dynatrace FastPack for Liferay Portal. It provides insights into the digital experiences geared specifically for three kinds of users:

For IT Operations: Dramatically improve efficiency by immediately isolating performance problems to the right fault domains by tracking user visits across back-end tiers

For Developers: Increase release frequency and quality by eliminating the time to recreate issues from production and gain confidence through build-to-build performance analysis

These views quickly show users how they are impacted so that they can take corrective action within their circle of concern and center of influence, in short order.

Since the Dynatrace FastPack for Liferay Portal is being released today, we don’t yet have any insight on what kind of feedback those shopping for solutions might provide. But one thing is already clear, there’s room for improvement in most digital customer journeys.

“Google has spoiled us,” said Masterson. We want everything we do in the digital world to be perfect and now. That’s regardless what device we use, what time of day it is, and where we are."

Ok, maybe if you’re on the top of a mountain in Nepal, you’ll have to wait a few seconds.

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